


Lateralus

by Ara (WalkUnseen)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Caleb and Fjord back at it again, Inspired by the way Matt asked that question and the way they answered, Self Harm for a Purpose, Spoilers Ep. 44, This duos dynamic keeps getting better and better and Im here for it, This show has me going crazy every week, blood sacrifice, blood warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2018-12-09
Packaged: 2019-09-14 22:37:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16921731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WalkUnseen/pseuds/Ara
Summary: The sear of salt into the wound is minimal compared to this suspension between them. Of held breath, a hush, an understanding, and the beginnings of a pact. Sacrilege settled across his shoulders and a burning in his veins that's nothing like fire but everything likeopportunity.





	Lateralus

**Author's Note:**

> ***Exams are done, I'm finally free, the chapters for my other two stories are in the editing process finally and I'm slowly picking through them and trying to remember how to human and actually proofread my stuff after it all. So have a short snippet of writing for now while I work my way through getting the other two updated ( and also some serious con crunching now that I dont have to go to classes and monitor the studios.)***
> 
> Title from Tool's song Lateralus. Which I listened to on repeat while writing this. 
> 
> Also play on words cause----> Lateral Thinking- the solving of problems by an indirect and creative approach, typically through viewing the problem in a new and unusual light.
> 
> When Matt asked them 'how far?' they were willing to go or whatever my brain did a thing. So this might be a little weird but ya know.
> 
> Blood pacts 'n the potential for one hell of a duo was born this Episode and I'm a little (a lotta) hyped for these muddied, bloodied grey areas in this campaign to have some ramifications. I'm guiltily ready for some more of that party conflict we saw in the beginning of this whole shebang. Because now there's stakes and they're getting pretty damn high.

The bite of the blade across his palm is _nothing_. 

The plume of blood, the grit of the stone beneath his hand as he presses it to the pedestal; all of it meaningless compared to the fervor caught between them. And he keeps Fjord’s gaze, holds it like a challenge, refuses to break it and he can see that Fjord, jaw tight and fists turned curled and eager, doesn't bow to this either. 

The sear of salt into the wound is minimal compared to this suspension between them. Of held breath, a hush, an understanding, the beginnings of a pact. Sacrilege settled across his shoulders and a burning in his veins that's nothing like fire but everything like _opportunity_. 

_’Aren't you the least bit curious?’_

An echo of a sentiment trapped in his skull that writhes with the curling trail escaping from beneath his hand. Laced with everything ever unsaid between them and curiosity caught beneath the way he smears his blood across the runes and inspects every inch of the half orc's stalwart expression for a crack. 

This runs far deeper than merely being curious.

He saw that intrigue, that glimmer of something more dangerous than ‘curiosity’ in the way Fjord picked up that crystal. The way his fingers curled around it and his eyes turned distant for a fraction of a moment, like he was _seeing_. Before he snapped back to himself and it took a breath too long for the half orc to shake it off but Caleb saw it. Saw that consuming gleam in the gold.

An opportunity is laid out before Fjord, a fragment of possibility. A branching of threads spanning from that moment that will surely come from this pact that grants him his powers and the potential for far, _far_ more and Caleb knows that look. He knows that every man has something that they are willing to sacrifice more than themself for. That even at the cost of everything there are some possibilities that aren't worth turning down, that are worth exploring until they've been exhausted as a viable thread to pull at and unravel. Only abandoned once the avenue is deemed successful or something _shatters._

Whichever comes first. 

He breaks their unspoken contract for an instant, eyes flicking to the scattered ichor on the runes, the crimson pulling towards it, drawn into them in the haunting reminiscent dance of blood magic and the red haze on the wall is all too telling and not nearly enough.

They need far more and he turns back to see Fjord settle his blade across the pit of his palm, gaze never leaving his.

_’I am always curious.’_

This isn't just a table, it's not just a ritual they don’t understand. It’s not just impulse and an unsatiated desire to see what this sea witch has hidden down here. It’s far more than that and he knows Fjord knows that as well. Garners it in the way he speaks in double, a meaning tucked beneath the words. Always hiding something down there beneath the brine he was meant to die in far before this ritual. 

But something brought him back and it's calling on its favor, it's coming to collect.

And Caleb never calls him out on it but he watches with narrowed eyes and a caution that might borderline on intrigue with each passing day the more Fjord lies to them. The more he tries to hide something beneath the drawl and the smile while his abilities only grow and the pact he's made broadens, steepens. The price increasing far beyond what any of them could have fathomed when they started off for the coast. 

He isn't sure what allures Fjord more; keeping these keys for himself as a means of ensuring that the door never gets blown open… or pressing those keys into that lock and throwing the barrier wide.  If the call of power is stronger than the potential ramifications. The cost and benefit of each route caught up in the steps Fjord is making here and Caleb can see him teetering on that line, one foot slipping, and he will have to choose a side to fall into soon. 

It's inevitable now that they have the last one and the means to finish this. 

It's only a matter of time before he has to make a decision and Caleb needs insurance here, he needs a small bit of control in case this goes wrong. And if it goes terribly right, the things Fjord could accomplish, the pieces of this reality that would be at his mercy, that could mean everything and more for what Caleb needs to eventually do. 

Power is power, no matter the source. 

And he _wants_ it. He needs it beside him because he knows he's never been strong enough to do it all himself.  

‘What are you willing to do for it?’

Fjord slides the blade down and the answering curl of blood into the water draws his attention. The slow, languid dissipation of red, the lazy trail of it, _serpentine_ , a venomous ribbon that's as much of a warning as the ever watchful orbs in the falchion. 

He answers Fjord with the weeping tear across his own, squeezes his palm over a set of those untainted runes, stains the water and the stone and he feels nothing but that fire building under his sternum as he watches it leave.

‘What is it worth?’

It's not nearly enough. 

He carves across his wrist with the dagger, doesn't flinch or hesitate, and Fjord answers him but the falchion bites deeper, cuts cleaner. And the answering crimson is a challenge that he falls to with another swiping lick of steel across the back of his forearm that tingles with that potential. 

He can hear Jester shouting, her protests morphed and shifted by the influence of the water and worthless to him in this moment because he won’t stop. Not unless Fjord tells him to, not until this pact is rectified, not until this sacrifice is complete and this agreement between them sealed because he has so much he needs to do and Fjord can help him.

‘How far will you go?’

He splits his skin again, tainting the sea with that ichor he's surprised isn't as deepened and sickly as rot. He falters a fraction of a moment, blinks heavily at the tinge swarming him,  hand slipping from around the blade that's remained impossibly clean from the constant brunt of water. All glinting and hungry metal save for a smiling line of gore along the edge.

His limbs in the process of turning unreliable beneath him, lulling, chin dipping forward, but another scattering cloud of crimson has him glancing back up to a waiting Fjord who's bled the water into a harrowing fire around him. He maintains that strict connection, that eye contact that makes his head buzz and his skin itch, skull alight with a tension dancing down his spine. Teeth grinding because he will not falter here, he will not fall because a favor, a debt, being owed something, that is what he needs more than anything. 

‘What will it take from you?’

Vignettes of black swarm the image of Fjord silhouetted in his growing nets of liquid rust and the familiar nausea and sickening euphoria of blood loss settles across him into the smallest hint of a smile. He drags that knife across his palm again anyways. Deepens the initial deal, widens it, solidifies it. Makes it so even as Jester reaches for him, her hand outstretched with the promise of sealing up the tremulous means of this contract, that it will _scar_. That it won’t fade into nothing because he needs it to be as permanent as the rest of the marks lining him, defining him and damning him. He needs it to ensure Fjord’s willingness to help when the time comes.

He needs their debt so he can survive.

‘What are you willing to give?’

He breathes heavily, the water clouded and muddy with the vestiges of iron bled into the ocean, the tang of it odd as it slips down his lungs and Fjord copies him, haloed in his own vermillion tinged shadow that refracts with the dull luminscence scattering the chamber and writhes like flames.

The other is unwavering, eyes alight with something implacable, something he knows is replicated in his own. It’s a promise, it’s the beginnings of a deal that the others could _never_ comprehend. 

_‘Can I count on you to return the favor?’_

Caleb knows Fjord has no idea what he wants to accomplish, that his goal might obliterate the half orc's fragile existence in a timeline that never should have existed. He's still unsure just how far Fjord is willing to go either. If the allure of power, if his _‘curiosity’_ , is strong enough to sway him into absolute servitude with his patron, into unlocking that door and letting something that never should belong to this age slither through and turn the world to ruin with them caught in it.

_'You do what you have to.'_

He levels those golden eyes, amber and calculating, as searching as the unblinking ones clutched in Fjord’s fist.

He has ideas, he has plans, he has the beginnings of machinations. Theories and research and the twisted scrawlings of a madman’s ramblings locked up in one of his books.

And here, a favor, an owed debt, an exchange; all infinitely valuable. Because with these additions, with each small favor, with each new variable, there's even more to add to that unsolvable equation. There is something new to add to the formula that he didn't have before.

“I am following your lead here,” he admits, low, leaning forward, blood etched water sliding across his tongue and hushed only enough that his words won't carry to them all, but steady and clear enough that his conviction is unmistakable. 

He sees the flicker across Fjord’s face, that familiar tic whenever someone lays the responsibility at the half-orc’s feet and it’s gone as quickly as it appears, smothered up by a steeled jaw and a minute nod.

“This is your quest. There are things I need to do that are not here, and I am going to need _help_ ," he continues and he pours everything into that admittance, lets his brows dip and his eyes pinch at the corners, sundered fist curling against the miniscule plume of crimson that seeps into the water like smoke.

He is going to need every inch of an advantage these people can give him. Every infetiemsal foothold they can help him carve into that bloodied rock face so he can claw his way up it. And a part of him knows he just might still be willing to climb over their bodies to get there when the time comes… but it's a sacrifice that might belay necessity. 

Even as he weaves that sentiment into this, lays down the path of companionship with simple favors and small tokens among them. Of sacrificing time with his cat for the aid of a monk whose fists are far stronger and her access to a wealth of knowledge and secrets far greater, a small snippet of Astrid to a tiefling who's deity is as mysterious as her unerring exuberance, a periapt from a dead man's neck to prevent the death of another who will keep him breathing, a brief conversation on gaining friendship, _loyalty_ ,  long past with a barbarian who is absent more often than here but worth every inch of the blade she wields, of this blood pact with a half orc whose patron, whose powers, whose _potential_ could mean _everything_... and of the already unwavering loyalty of a goblin who he thinks he could potentially die for, and that still screams the most _dangerous_ amongst them all. 

“I understand,” Fjord breathes and the blood, still in the measured process of diffusing, obfuscates parts of his true hue in a crimson tinted stained glass,  “I think we’re good here. We can go.”

Red still sluggishly paints around Caleb's own palm, the healing gone to the brunt of the self injurious fervor adorning his arm. Yet it does not sting, it does not hurt, it just bleeds and there is nothing that could ever feel like this.

Because it  _burns_  with a providential promise.

“We understand each other,” Fjord says and a hand is outstretched to him, its own trace of red spilling into the sea in a small sluggish seam. 

It’s an offering, a sureified reach across that remaining gap. A bridge that fits over that mistrust, that smothers the distant bite of a blade against his throat, that builds up atop that steadily growing belief that he's _everything_ but absolutely self serving in Fjord’s eyes. He takes it with his own, holds tight, mingles that crimson between them and he knows Jester is watching, that the others still here probably are too, but they won’t understand this.

And Fjord is wrong.

They can’t understand each other. 

Not when they hold their bruised and battered cards tight to their chests and only show those parts of themselves to each other that are acceptable, that are the cleanest, the least steeped in dripping ink and smudges that obscure the image. A muddled clarity to who they are, to their true intentions here. 

‘Who are you _really_?’ 

They are both very good at hiding, at lying, at deceiving. 

‘How much of you is Fjord?’ 

And he thinks the others have forgotten how well Fjord is at putting on a show, at playing his part on that stage for them. He's starting to think that Fjord might just be something else, or at least cobbled together parts of someone else, a plethora of other people. That he's not just the do-gooder, the lawful, the man with a moral compass in this group of misfits and runaways. That Fjord's running away from something too and now…well, now he's been given the means to turn around and face it.  

‘And what will you do with it?’ 

Caleb understands power, he understands revenge, he understands sacrifice... and he's sure Fjord does too.

_’Aren't you the least bit curious?’_

He knows what he needs to do and he knows what it might take to do it.

‘ _I am **always** curious _’

And Fjord will help him when the time comes.

They return to the surface, to the bite of air against the cut rather than salt and he breathes in a lungful of it that sits oddly under his ribs. The beginnings of a storm greet them as they reach the deck and he meets Fjord's eyes. 

‘Will you watch it fall?’ 

The call of forked lightning breathes ozone into the air and a chill bites across his cheek that's reminiscent of the dagger relinquished to his belt. The quiet plip of crimson onto the deck is thunderous in his ears, trails quietly maneuvering the valleys of his palm and trailing down his fingers in a phantom echo of the heat of Fjord's hand in his own. Their aborted ritual completed by the witch, left to live another day in her sepulcre of spectrals who are far less terrifying than the shambling corpses of ash and ember that tether him down.

‘What is holding you back?’  

The half orc turns to man the ship, slipping into that title of captain comfortably as rain patters the deck and the sky deepens but only to the fringes of threatening.

He wonders if Fjord wanted to find Vandren down there. If closure is what he's searching for as much as the answers he barely even knows the questions to. If this Vandren's abandonment of their patron is what ties Fjord more to his quiet hope or to his quieter conviction. He wonders if Vandren is part of Fjord's equation in this. If finding him is part of his solution. He wonders what Vandren would offer Fjord if he was here. 

‘Will you give this up for him?’

Sentiment is dangerous. It gets in the way. It's something to wield, to hide behind, to dangle and offer and trade over because it means connections, it can mean loyalty, and there's an unfortunate safety in numbers now that he's had to start over from the beginning. 

And sentiment is a threat. It could ruin everything. This phantom, this presumed dead man, this Vandren could nullify their agreement. He could turn Fjord off this path that could be endlessly prosperous or forever ruinous.

‘Who are you willing to stop for?’ 

Fjord is busy with the others, keeping the ship from careening into the storm they started together, into this mess they began because they were curious and he thinks about what storm might lie over that horizon now that there's the promise of a favor bled into his palm.

‘ _Aren't you the least bit curious?’_

He slinks down below, retreats into the shadowed innards and lets that blood collect at the edges of his hand amongst the vestiges of brine, feels it begin to dry and clot and remain. Fingers only itching to slip the book from its holster, flip to the back, to pages filled with everything but spells. 

_‘I am always curious.’_

He writes all of it down in that book, amongst the thousands of other promises he’s tethered to himself. Adds another name to that annotated ledger of debts, mulls over the ways these people slot into that careful method taking form the more he learns about them.

__

‘Can I count on you to return the favor?’

And he labors over that equation, works over that impossible solution until he knows the sun has risen, the sacrifice stuck to his skin; auspicious crimson.

**_’Always .’_ **

**Author's Note:**

> A few things- 
> 
> *Caleb’s entire personality is a Tool album I swear to god. 
> 
> *The new intro killed me and resurrected me all in one. 
> 
> *From one formerly/reformed shitty person who used to manipulate/befriend/do whatever I needed to for people in order to gain personal safety and achieve my goals to a currently shitty (albeit fictional) person who is using the same tactics; I see you motherf*cker. 
> 
> examples/me reading too far into this as per the usual: Him saying the exact shit Beau and Nott basically said to him when Fjord was down in the dumps after getting back to Zadash following the Lorenzo arc. the whole “you can't blame yourself for when others take advantage of you.” yah, _hah_ , some people might see that as the steps to healing and understanding it wasn't his fault but to be frank it didn't feel like that. It felt like assuaging it, a front for Beauregard and a helping hand for Fjord that had all kinds of mixed intentions with it. Like I don't think Caleb is end all be all evil… but if you're raised to deceive people, if you learn that making people like you is the only way to survive, you might not even remember how to make friends or befriend people outside of that context anymore or at least you think you do but it's never right.  Everything in your head is, “How do they benefit me?”, “What can they offer?”, “What will this partnership do in the end?” “There's always a reason they're my friend it's never just because?” And when you figure it out you just dig for it and you do whatever you need to to make it happen, you keep them around and you keep tabs on those little things you've done for them and you wait to collect on those favors like clockwork and vice versa you keep track of what they've done for you and try to immediately repay it so it doesn't stack up against you. But you're okay with stacking it up against other people to ensure you have that safety net when you need it. Also the thing with Caduceus and the periapt, like the giving over of an item that could literally ensure his survival but weighed against the odds of possible contention in the group is too real. The cost benefit ratios and the economics of friendship are way too crispy in this boy's head. And it gets even /better / when you don't even think you're even worth actual friendship and shit too.
> 
> p.s. I love Caleb but that doesn't mean I can't criticize his shit. I will call it likes I sees it.


End file.
